Category: Weblogs

Another bad week for social networking in general and Facebook especially? Reading blog entries from Nico and Wolfgang, a heavily discussed Facebook post by moeffju plus the Business Insider piece “Facebook is a fundamentally broken product” one might get the idea that social networks have failed us, betrayed us and we should therefore draw consequences, like going away or praying for a better social network.

I think that’s rubbish.
When you throw more information into a system it gets fuzzier. End. Of. Story. And if you think technology is there to solve it you’re wrong. It might. In the future. Not even Amazon has it worked out, their recommendations engine breaks once you have more than 100 orders or so, just because of the variance from your ideal you.

Sorry, but when you have 5000 Twitter followers or 700 Facebook friends and complain that your experience sucks it’s just your own fault. You throw crap into the system you’ll get crap out.
The BI article argues Facebook fails us in not finding a good way to show 1,500 messages a day. 1,500 messages? Are you reading what you’re arguing? Who’d want to read that? Who in his right mind announces proudly “whoopee, inbox-zero” on the one hand and puts himself into such a mess on the other? (aside from social media experts who claim they “have to do this for work”)

I like Wolfgang’s piece because he seems well aware of the dilemma and shares how he uses social networks. I am not going to bore you with my take on it, let’s just say that I know where to find what interests me and what interests me finds me in reverse. And I sleep well knowing that I will miss things, life’s just too short to worry about that one rig rundown video on YouTube I didn’t see.

And I know. I still spend too much time on Facebook. But at least I know all the people there join my conversation regularly and I like them to do that. Because that is my criteria for adding people. And seriously, sometimes even 200 is too much.

On a final note let me remind you that this is “network is broken dilemma” is neither new nor is it the right argument. Go back in time 5 years and you’ll remember Robert Scoble had this figured out already, doing the big “unfollow-everybody and start over” with his RSS subscriptions and later with Twitter because it was too much to handle.
Let’s be real and acknowledge too much information breaks the system and it’s your job to limit the amount and quality of the input.

To be honest, I had hoped for some feedback on my announcement that I moved from the PR unit into the advertising unit. That I had chosen to work with clients from the renewables sector. But I guess I did not anticipate that almost a third of my readers (aka 40-50) took that as a cue to unsubscribe. I mean, it’s not that I constantly wrote about PR before, so I am not foreseeing me constantly writing about advertising now. But hey, that is the freedom of RSS. I’ll just have to write more compelling posts that lure new readers.

Thank you everybody for watching the Speaking English Podcast for the past two years, yesterday was the day. I am very grateful for all the feedback, positive as well as critical.

What started out as a podcast playground turned into a quite a project, with quite some content delivered as far as Feedburner tells me:

Not to brag, but the actual views served is much higher, with content distributed on Revver, Sevenload, MySpace and several other platforms. Revver remains the service of choice at the moment, but it is hardly a money maker.

As a consequence (trying to find a different model), I am delivering episodes 85-89 ad-free and with a higher quality, hoping to attract more happy viewers and maybe finally a sponsor. As you can see on my revver-site, views over the last shows are up to 45k, feed subscribers around 2k. If I were a (reference) book publisher, soft drink producer, electronics vendor, hard drive manufacturer I’d take a real close look at the numbers 😉 Also in the works is a DVD (taking a page out of the Tim Ferris play-book).

Enough baiting. Thanks again for watching, I wish I had more time to do a live show or maybe some Seesmic-action at a scheduled hour once a week. Maybe in the future. And remember, you can always chat me up at sebastiankeil at gmail dot com.